‘Thieves, Child Killers, Sexual Abusers, Thugs, Criminals’: Syracuse University Scholar, a Pulitzer Prize Winner, Goes on Tirade Against Israeli People

A Syracuse University visiting scholar and the 2025 Pulitzer Prize winner for commentary described Israelis as “thieves,” “child killers,” “sexual abusers,” “thugs,” and “criminals” at a conference in Detroit over the weekend.

Palestinian “poet” Mosab Abu Toha spoke at the People’s Conference for Palestine on Sunday on a panel titled, “Gaza Resists, Gaza Remains.” He argued Israel’s war effort will “fail” because, “We know that no matter how long a thief keeps your property, it will remain your property.” Israelis, he said, “will remain thieves.”

“Now they are not only thieves, but they are child killers, they are sexual abusers,” he said. “I mean, what else should the Palestinian people do to show the world that these people are thugs [and] these people are criminals? They should be held accountable.”

Abu Toha’s appearance at the conference came just months after the Pulitzer board awarded him the prize for commentary for a series of anti-Israel essays published in the New Yorker. His extremist social media posts surfaced some 24 hours later, including one in which he objected to the media’s “humanization” of Israelis abducted by Hamas.

“How on earth is this girl called a hostage? (And this is the case of most ‘hostages’),” Abu Toha wrote on Facebook in early February, shortly before Pulitzer deliberations began. “This is Emily Damari, a 28 [year-old] UK-Israeli soldier that Hamas detailed [sic] on 10/7… So this girl is called a ‘hostage?’ This soldier who was close to the border with a city that she and her country have been occupying is called a ‘hostage?'”

Damari, who was abducted from her home in Kibbutz Kfar Aza and spent 471 days in Hamas captivity, condemned the Pulitzer board for giving Abu Toha the prize. The Pulitzer board has not addressed the controversy, nor has it reached out to Damari.

Abu Toha did not shy away from controversy at the People’s Conference for Palestine. His presence alone raised eyebrows, given the event featured convicted Palestinian terrorists as speakers. Once on stage, Abu Toha likened the “Nakba” to the Holocaust.

“The other point that I wanted to share with you is that on October 7, we heard a lot of the Western media, mainstream media, saying that Hamas killed Holocaust survivors and they abducted Holocaust survivors,” Abu Toha said. “But how many of you heard any journalist saying that Israel, until today, they killed over 1,000 Nakba survivors? Have you ever heard of that? No.”

At another point on the panel, Abu Toha decried the “Israeli occupation’s tactic to murder, imprison, and intimidate Palestinian artists and writers.” To back up the claim, he cited Ghassan Kanafani, a former spokesman for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine who was involved in the terrorist organization’s 1972 Lod Airport massacre outside Tel Aviv, as well as Dareen Tatour, an Israeli Arab known for releasing a poem that included the lines, “Resist, my people, resist them. / Resist the settler’s robbery / And follow the caravan of martyrs.”

Abu Toha also shouted out the late Islamic University of Gaza professor Refaat Alareer, describing him as a “dear friend.” During an Oct. 7, 2023, BBC interview, Alareer called Hamas’s terror attack “legitimate and moral” and said it was “exactly like the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. This is the Gaza ghetto uprising against 100 years of European and Zionist colonialism and occupation.” And he lamented the “death in prison of Palestinian novelist Walid Daqqa,” who was convicted of commanding a group of Israeli Arabs affiliated with the PFLP who abducted and killed an Israeli soldier in 1984.

Abu Toha was born in Gaza and studied English at the Islamic University of Gaza. He came to the United States in 2019 to serve as Harvard University’s “visiting poet” and “librarian-in-residence.” He received a master’s in creative writing from Syracuse in 2023 and returned to the school one year later as a visiting scholar through the Scholars at Risk program.

The People’s Conference for Palestine, its second annual iteration, garnered roughly 3,500 attendees who met to “prepare for the next phase of struggle” and “continue building and strengthening a mass movement in North America.” Other People’s Conference for Palestine speakers included Omar Assaf, a former member of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine terror group who spent eight years in jail. Assaf, who addressed the crowd virtually after the Trump administration prepared to block visas for “terrorist sympathizers,” called for terror attacks against Israelis like those seen during the First Intifada.

“I want to speak about the repression and, particularly, the Palestinian Authority,” Assaf said during a panel titled, “Palestine Today: Struggle, Resistance and the Path Forward.”

“Some would like to say that the Palestinians have no leadership, but what I will say is that it would be better if we had no leadership … because we would not have a fence or a barrier between us and the occupier, and so we can confront it. And that was the case in the Intifada of ’87, but right now, the PA acts as this barrier that stops us from confronting it.”

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